Currently Reading or Recommend.

What I'm listening to on iTunes.

April 30, 2006

No I'm not starting one, although it would be interesting and fun. Since I spend 6-8 hours a day in the car, and there are days that it's way more than that, my iPod is an essential part of my daily gear. Now, I've got music to be sure and Podcasts too, only due to the fact that Denver Radio is held ransom by Clear Channel. My personal take on Denver radio is that, an hour of a radio show, is 42 minutes of commercial's, show promotions, traffic and news updates, interspersed with 18 minutes of actual show content, and if a talk show, a listener phone call now and then. That said, I'll note that there are some bright spots on the radio dial. A couple of examples, KNUS, who hosts Hugh Hewitt amongst others, and on the FM side, 99.5 The Mountain which reminds me of the early days of radio.

I've made use of iTunes to get Podcasts and so far I've been rather unimpressed. Now, given that this is still an emerging technology, and there are those discussions regarding "Why Podcasting" and is there any sort of business model to follow or to attach to Podcasting, there's really a lot of crap out in the Podcasting world.

I'll do Part II and let you know what I'm listening to and what I've listened to and trashed.

The base also hosts the Colorado Air National Guard, who we can see here performing a rescue training exercise. It would appear that a rescueman is being lowered from a Blackhawk helicopter to the lake below, where the helicopter’s downwinds are creating circular waves.

April 25, 2006

Not that I'm unhappy with my current picture uploading, and yet I'm always on the lookout for something new and different. However in this case, the program doesn't support my Samsung A920

ShoZu - the best cameraphone uploader: "ShoZu 2.5 is even better than previous versions (not perfect yet, e.g. need the ability to reply to flickr comments and the address book feature is irrelevant to Mac users; that's what iSync is for!). If you have a cameraphone and an unlimited data plan, then you need ShoZu. After uploading 2500 photos with ShoZu, I can honestly say that if ShoZu doesn't run on your phone then you bought the wrong one! I personally can't recommend any camera phone that doesn't work with ShoZu.

Not satisfied? Neither were the Shozu developers. That's why they added the one additional feature that makes this application worth at least fifty bucks a copy in my opinion: you can back up your address book to your Shozu account and retrieve it should your phone get lost or stolen or simply upload it when you replace your phone. Gone are the miserable days of transferring your address book entries one by one. Good by arthritis, hello Shozu. And if that doesn't sell you on the application, which, as you can see I like an awful lot, it can only mean one of two things; either you're trying to build a competitive application or you don't have a camera phone. In either case it's your tough luck.

April 22, 2006

Another instance of Walmart and their excellent (sic) customer service. The lovely and talented lady of the house needed her perscription refilled for her restless leg syndrome. She's been using Walmart's pharmacy for about a year or so for her prescription, so now it comes time to get a refill. We make use of their auto attendant to get the refill. We were informed that the prescription would be ready on Friday. Now on Saturday afternoon, while at the pharmacy, I'm told they're not able to fill it until the first of the week. Minor problem here in that the lovely and talented lady of the house is leaving on a trip out of town for a week and is in need of this while she's gone. Apparently, according to the "less than helpful" pharmacy employee, (or at least the guy behind the counter) this location was out of the pills needed to fill this request. Now, why in the world would a pharmacy be out of a particular medicine? Why would this pharmacy be unable to make a phone call, to another local Walmart Pharmacy to take care of their requests? When I asked if I can just go to another Walmart Pharmacy and have the perscription filled, it's just not possible. The vast Walmart network doesn't talk internally. This means that one pharmacy doesn't talk to or have the capabilities of sharing information between one another. So in order to have the perscription refilled, we would need to have the perscription tranfered to another Walmart Pharmacy, and hopefully they have the pills needed. So now it's back to Walgreens.